Rose Wylie: Quack Quack
Serpentine Sackler Gallery
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I couldn’t take my eyes off the giant colorful and exaggerative oil paintings. Those large paintings of Rose Wylie were inspired by extensive visual culture. Her paintings had a huge range of themes, such as Egyptian pilgrim mural paintings, the epitome of Persia, movies, news stories, celebrity gossip, and her observations of daily live.
Through her art work, Wylie wanted to convey the message that the possibility of rebelliousness should be treated in an unsophisticated way. She watched numerous movies, read a tremendous amount of news reports and observed various eye-catching parades. She dug deep into these experiences and gained some unique perceptions. In each house, even the minimal detail would not break the rule. Wylie tends to use words to strengthen the facts and recollections based on the filter of memories and impressions. She likes to cover a new canvas on the image before editing it, such as collages.
Wylie is good at producing bold incompact oil paintings, which usually include multiple boards. Her works and repeated images were mainly frame devices inspired by collages, movies, carton strips, and prefabricated panels of the Renaissance. She knew how to extract her themes to form concise observation based on her memories. Besides, she liked to underline her recollections with words.
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Her caricatures of football players were bold, childish and rough, featuring the elements you barely notice: the convulsion of Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, the imperceptibility of Rooney, and the relative broadness of Jens Lehmann.
Polly Apfelbaum: Dubuffer’s Feet My Hands
Frith Street Gallery
I was overwhelmed by special feelings. When I walked into the gallery, I was totally attracted by the colorful blocks orderly arranged on the wall in varied sizes. As I approached the wall, I found out that the blocks were various porcelain hands in different shapes with smooth glaze.
This piece of art was evolved from the ongoing glaze porcelain experiments of Apfelbaum. She visited Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo during her stay in the American Academy of Rome, where she drew inspiration from the mosaics and the God’s “floating hands”. She was obsessing about using human body to symbolize creations or interventions. She took her own hands as the model of the above work, establishing an internal connection between her work and the artist.
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Human brains always fall behind hands. Even if our brains have surpassed our hands, the fingers still need to summarize the findings of touch. For example, the epidermis of hand would tremble when touching the clay; it can also feel the of tearing caused by sharp gravers, the acid-corroded metal plate, the slight vibration of a piece of flatwise paper, the influence of textures, and the interlacing of fibers.
Rachel Whiteread
Tate Britain
She endowed the internal space with the feeling of strengthen and existence.She used various industrial materials (e.g. plaster, resin, rubber and metal) to forge daily supplies and architectural space. Each piece of work, from tinny to giant and from intimate to alien, has its own story.
These various-sized works, including mattresses, windows and staircases, were placed in a giant partition-free space in the exhibition hall of Tate.They seemed really straightforward at first glance. Those common materials were displayed in an unexpected negative space pattern.
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How to manipulate the invisible and impalpable “space”? Rachel provided an explicit answer, which was “to build a space”. She built the model layer by layer to form pieces of square bricks symbolizing indoor “atmosphere”, trying to preserve the trace of wall, floor, window frame, and door plank, inch by inch. She then piled those square bricks step by step to reproduce the intangible, transparent, and drifting “space” of a house in a new space.
The unique feature of Whiteread lies in the sharing of stuff, namely, the common space of daily objects and the art itself. She insisted that, despite the consistency metaphorical property of her works, they should preserve their specific features, including the volume, mass, physical features and superficiality, the absorbency and light-resistance, reflection and refraction, the luster and dullness, the solemnity and sparkle, and even the colors (tremendous amount of white, gray, amber, yellow and a series of Morandi dust or shadow).
Morandi
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Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna: Museo Morandi
This March I went to MAMbo in Italy. In the art museum, Museo Morandi has collected more than 200 works of Morandi, including oil paintings, watercolor, sketches, and etchings. I used to see his works on books when I was a senior high school student. Now this was my first time to witness so many of his authentic works.
He used daily necessaries e.g. cups, dishes, bottles, boxes or pots and common life scenes as his creation objects. He would put a bottle in an extremely pure sketch to create a harmonious atmosphere through a pure and simple way. Most of the works in the showroom were not covered with a glass shield. I can see the dosage of pigments, the direction of brush strokes, and the texture of the works when I get close. This is rare for any good quality pictures or books. Seen from a distance, Morandi’s works exhibited a balanced and subtle eternity in the rules and boundaries between virtual and real, human and object, bright and dark, black and white, with or without, local and whole, and time and space.
Eroded Landscape, a sculpture piece made by UK sculptor Tony Cragg, was displayed at the end of the Museum of Giorgio Morandi. The work adopted the same familiar bottles, pots and cup, which already transcended their original functions and became an eternal state. Through sculpture, the artist created a delicate balanced drama where objects were steady just like dreams and presented the truth upon the collapse of the dream.
Memory
“In my early work I pretended to speak about my childhood, ye my real childhood had disappeared. I have lied about it so often that I no longer have a real memory of this time, and my childhood has become for me some kind of universal childhood, not a real one.”
Christian Boltanski, In Conversation with Tamar Garb, 1996
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Memory collects many records about memories and ideas of contemporary art. From the late 1940 s to the present works of art, the book records, and analyzes the wide array of memory in the art of relationship, repeat, and forgotten. This book explains what artists will once again return to the theme of memory, and through different media and the way to express. At the same time also to the important impact of my work.
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Michael Newman
Analogue, Chance and Memory//2011
“...The sea is like memory. However lost or forgotten, everything in it is exists forever...”
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Also wrote in the book, if every sound waves left echo, the shell will have been recorded. I think it is really wonderful, in addition to memory, everything in the world is ever dies. It has always been there.Memories may be selective amnesia and reappearance. The material will be converted into other things still floating in the universe.
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Briony Fer
The Infinite Line//2004
“If the new is a form of repetition, then could we imagine repetition as evoking not only the always already-made of memory but also, in almost the same breath, the possibility of making the new?”
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"We are lost without repetition." This article discusses the relationship between the repeat in the applications of art's and memory. In this paper, talking about in the modern aesthetics, for example, Morandi's bottles and De Kooning's women as the theme, shows the process of typical modernist structure. Also, Deleuze started his little work and repeated it.
In my opinion, repetition and time became a pair of wonderful collocation, they constitute an irreplaceable memory fragments.
